I've seen this game described as a "roguelite survival city builder" and while that is in no way inaccurate, it does the game an enormous disservice in that hearing those words in that order makes me want to immediately go to sleep.
What this game actually is, is a very smart take on the city builder genre that understands the tension at the heart of the genre:
- City builders are best when you're engaged in self-directed play
- City builders are best when you have clear goals
- City builders are best in the 'building up' phase and tend to fall apart in the 'managing and tuning' phase.
And it resolves these tensions beautifully. It has a campaign structure like many an Impressions game of yesteryear, but what's important about it being 'roguelite' here is not the normal elements of roguelike structure (the difficulty, the semi-permanent failure modes, etc) but rather that it replaces the prescriptive campaigns those games had with another layer of self-directed play. The entire game is designed around drafting, really; you draft perks, you draft buildings, most importantly you draft goals, and it's a game of matching one to the other.
I think this is pretty clearly the city builder (really, the strategy game) of 2023. It's also a good demo of why genre labels can be very useless.
